Modeling energetic neutral atoms and the IBEX spectrum

The interaction between the solar wind (SW) and the local interstellar medium (LISM) has been studied for decades, but has only recently been scrutinized using observational data. One such mission, NASA's Interstellar Boundary EXplorer (IBEX), has provided a wealth of new data that allows for a global picture of the heliospheric interface. While the mysterious “ribbon” seen in the IBEX data has attracted a lot of attention, data from other parts of the sky can still tell us much about the plasma conditions in those directions, and the termination shock conditions that heated the plasma. In this paper we investigate the ENA spectrum seen by IBEX and compare this to various model predictions, both with and without the ribbon.